Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Fixing Dailies

By most accounts, dailies are the number one issue in Mists of Pandaria. Personally, I didn't have an issue with the dailies in Pandaria, mostly because I didn't really care about them and did them desultorily. I'm still not exalted with the Klaxxi, the Serpent Riders, or the Anglers.

I think the issue with dailies was not so much the actual dailies, or even the fact that you had to do dailies to earn reputation. I think the main problem was that Blizzard chose to make reputation the mechanism to deliver alternate raid gear.

I think that link between reputation and raid gear coupled dailies and raiding too tightly together. It would have been better if that link was not as strong. Previous expansions had epics, but it was usually only a single piece per faction.

If I was redoing reputation, here's what I would have done for the expansion launch reputations:

This moves dailies and reputation down in the chain. Instead of being on par with raiding or high end PvE, reputation is on par with dungeons and scenarios.

2. Items cost gold instead of Valor.

Valor and reputation made for a double gate that was somewhat unnecessary. Simplify things by going back to just gold. Valor could be saved for separate raid gear vendors, upgrading, or simply dropped all together.

3. At Exalted, sell a Bind-On-Account Tabard that allows you gain Rep from dungeons, scenarios, and raids.

This is to help alts out. Your first character has to earn reputation the hard way, but subsequent characters have more options in how they earn reputation, and can earn rep simultaneously with dungeon gearing.

4. When patch 5.2 came out, add i489 epic gear to Exalted on old Reputations.

This keeps the rewards coming for the older reputations, adding additional catchup mechanisms, and adding rewards for the pure solo player.

Essentially, I think that putting reputations on the same level as raiding was a mistake. Reputations would have functioned better one level down, on par with 5-man dungeons and scenarios.

I have to agree about the issue with Valor. "Hiding" gear behind a reputation wall is one thing, but adding an additional "barrier" of using Valor to purchase said gear was just excessive and felt penalizing. The gear should be the reward for completing the rep grind, not just a "first step" to earning the right to purchase it by other means. Kind of reminds me of "Personal Seat Licenses" that NFL teams use to sell season tickets. "Pay us THEN you can pay us again to buy the actual ticket." :P

I'm still okay with rep vendors selling epics, but I think 476 epics would have been a much better choice. No trinkets might have also been a wise decision. The absolutely massive item level difference between 463 5-man gear and 489/496 raid gear-- which in this case included rep gear-- made reputation gear [especially trinkets] way too good for raiders to be in any way optional.

I don't know about making rep gear equivalent to 5 mans, unless you made revered obtainable by questing (which for Klaxxi, was). It takes forever too et rep. Chain running dungeons in LFD for like a day or two was sufficient to get most of my 463s, including on my DPS. Perhaps splitting the difference , as Coreus suggests with 476 would have been better.

I totally agree with 2, 3 and 4. For 1, I think the reputation rewards should be the same as heroic dungeon rewards which should be the same as LFR. Justice can provide slightly lower gear to fill slots. Valor can go back to being raid only (with maybe a small amount from LFR, to give you a bit of a head start).

What you then need to do is adjust all those systems so it take around the same amount of time to gear to the max they can provide. With the luck element in LFR and dungeons, Reputation would provide an excellent alternative if you grind some to fill slots. Drops

Let players choose how they want to gear, but limit raid gear to raiding (since that is what you use it for anyway).

Blizzard's original goal was to make it so people who didn't want to raid had a way to get 489s by doing dailies and spending valor. Within that framework, their idea worked quite well.

Unfortunately, it simply wound up being mandatory for raiders to do, as you mentioned. And it was worse than that since raiders had to do all of them constantly since they did not know what items would drop during raids. Made the first few months of Mists of Pandaria complete hell.

Some good comments here to a nice grassroots issue post. Thank you. I love this game.The bottom line is: I've been playing since launch and this expansion was the least fun I've had so far. My raid leader didn't push anyone to spend 3 hours doing dailies, it was ME that felt like I wasn't doing as much as I could if I didn't get them done. I hated every second of that feeling. Now since ToT got released I spend less and less time in the game (ie. just raiding with my 10man). Is that where Blizzard wanted me to be? By this time I'd have 3-4 alts max leveled by now. This xpac 0.